Here's a brief quotation from the book The Enemy Within (my subject line above is the subtitle) by John Demos, a professor of history at Yale.
This is from p. 91, for those keeping score.
"Pennsylvania's founding came in 1682, relatively late; thus, it had a briefer, more attenuated involvement with witchcraft [than several other colonies]. ....Still, in 1684 the 'proprietor' William Penn and his council conducted a full-blown prosecution of charges that had come from within the ranks of the colony's Swedish minority. Two women, Margaret Mattson and Greta Hendrickson, stood accused of bewitching cows and practicing other 'sorceries' over a span of at least 20 years. The jury returned an unusual sort of split verdict: 'guilty of the common fame of a witch, but not guilty in manner and form as she stands indicted.'"
Then we're on to another subject. Mattson and Hendrickson never re-appear. Still, the passage bugs me.
Did the split verdict mean "they probably are witches, but we can't punish them because they weren't caught in the act"?
Or does it mean "guilty of acquiring the reputation of being witches, but nothing more"?
if it meant the latter, why was that different from a simple "not guilty" verdict in the laws in force in the early Pennsylvania colony?
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Assuming that the two women were prosecuted under a statute, I don't think that we can answer the question unless we have a copy of the statute in front of us and the exact wording of the charges, which, one would assume, would refer to the statute. We would also want to know how terms such as "common fame" were defined by statute, or, if not defined by statute, how they were used in other court decisions in those days. Perhaps to have the "common fame of a witch" meant to be a witch (in which case the first half of your two alternatives would be equivalent to one another), and perhaps the charge of practicing other sorceries was the equivalent of being a witch (in which case the women were found guilty of that part of the charge). (In the U.S. today, it is not illegal to be a drug addict; it is illegal to possess certain drugs. In 1684, was it a crime to be a witch if one had never acted as a witch?) Demos has no law degree (I checked the Yale website) and so, in his paraphrasing, he may not be sensitive to the precision with which criminal charges are drafted (although perhaps they weren't drafted with such precision in 1684). In short, it is pointless to speculate on the meaning of the verdict on the basis of the information that you have provided to us.
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